Ericsson ties up with locals to develop Net

JAKARTA (JP): Telecommunications infrastructure provider PT Ericsson Indonesia said here on Wednesday that it would cooperate with local application companies to develop mobile Internet services in the country.

Ericsson Indonesia's president Mats H. Olsson said that it had reached agreements with five local companies and was in the process of negotiations with five more.

He declined to reveal the names of the companies until firm agreements had been concluded with all of them.

"We have already reached agreement with five companies, and more than five others are in the pipeline, but we're waiting for the number to grow to 10 companies before we start announcing," Olsson told a media workshop here.

Communications manager, Dewi Widiyanti, said the kind of applications offered to the local companies included specific client-oriented applications such as mobile banking and mobile ticketing.

The rapid development of the short message service (SMS) in the country was a sure indicator of the increasingly popular data exchange between mobile users, Ericsson Indonesia's director of consumer products Susanto Sosilo said.

"For example, the SMS traffic of Satelindo increased by almost 100 percent when the inter-operator service was introduced earlier this month," he said, citing that traffic for the cellular operator increased to about 60 million messages a month from 30 million before the inter-operator service was available.

Susanto said that SMS was in fact the first and necessary step to moving towards third generation mobile services with their high-speed data transmission.

Ericsson took a step further when it recently established a forum, the Ericsson Developers' Zone (EDZ), for application developers to exchange ideas and introduce their products to the global market.

The company's Internet applications senior manager Hindra Irawan said the web-based EDZ brought together application developers, content providers, operators, technology providers and cellular operators.

"The aim is to accelerate the development of mobile Internet applications for future telecommunications services," he said.

Currently EDZ has more than 90,000 individual members and more than 3,000 corporate members, some of which are from Indonesia Hindra said. He stated though that he did not know the exact number of Indonesian members.

In relation to the massive layoffs planned on account of the economic slowdown in the United States and Western Europe, Olsson asserted that layoffs of Ericsson employees would not take place in Indonesia as business in the country had in fact doubled for two years in a row.

"Ericsson will reduce 10,000 people globally, of which 4,000 are from Sweden ... there will be no layoffs in Indonesia as we need all the people we have," he said. (tnt)